Chronic Disrespect (Part 3)

By David Spry  

Continued from Part 2

The belief of many people, that their religion makes them special and superior to non-believers often has competitive and prejudicial motivations.

The social contests of the schoolyard and the cheap shots made by politicians in a never-ending cycle have been with us for a long time. But the advent of the internet and social media has lifted the practice of point-scoring to a truly destructive level.

Point-scoring in person and, more pervasively, on phones and computers is the primary tool in bullying, social denigration and expressions of prejudice. Because they would be thought of as weakening the points being scored, considerations of fairness and empathy are absent. If you have scored the points and beaten someone, without being held accountable, you have won.

In the modern world, in business and personal interactions “the Bushranger Principle” reigns supreme – “you just do what you can get away with.”

Making the score and winning the points are paramount in achieving one’s status and reducing the status of the recipient.

There are no rules, let alone objective assessments. Once engaged, the competition is relentless and becomes normal, not just on the phones or the computers but in the social environments where the competitors live.

Because the only real focus is on winning, there are no ethics or objective assessments of the arguments or the ‘evidence’ used, so prejudice and falsehoods have free range and simple, brutal claims can be loudly proclaimed.

One of the self-absorbed beliefs recently gaining traction asserts that one is not required to have a basic and general respect for other people, but that each person that an individual encounters has to prove to that individual that they are worthy of respect, in that individual’s mind, before they deserve to receive it.

Such competitors stridently claim their rights to their opinions and their rights to free speech, as if such claims are a complete answer to any criticism, but the achievement of a fair and equitable society is dependent on additional considerations.

Rights must always be balanced with principles of respect and responsibility, because asserting rights alone can put people in conflict with each other when they claim rights to the same things or situations.

As soon as considerations of respect and responsibility are introduced into the mix of human behaviour, it becomes clear that competition and point-scoring need to be modified into practices that are humanly sustainable.

Personal relationships, families and social groupings can achieve more sustainable humane outcomes if they avoid the intrusion of competition. Love and commitment cannot be unconditional if competition is a factor in the relationship.

Many men in positions of power over women perceive themselves to be entitled to those positions, not just because they are men, but because they have competed their way to such positions – they have won through against competitors – they are permanent winners. They have escaped accountability for any doubtful conduct in reaching their goal. They take pride in being ruthless – they feel justified in acting without pity or compassion for others. Consequently, they argue that to concede power to women, the women will have to successfully compete with them for the power.

Of course, such a competition would not be on a level playing field and, as we can see every day, those in positions of power have no intention of surrendering any points that will weaken their claims to that power.

Their defence of their dominance is made easy for them as they see no need to allow consideration of concepts of respect, fairness or equality to be part of the issue, and no-one can make them.

Enormous effort has been made, and is still being made, for women to compete with men to show that they are of equal merit, but it is unlikely that they can succeed to a sufficient degree to level the playing field, because they are competing in an arena where the men make the rules and where the men will use all at their disposal, ethical and unethical, to defend their power.

As with domestic violence, the answer is not competition, but the application of respect and an honest application of responsibility that accords to women and girls the recognition and equality that they deserve as essential members of humanity.

This is not a simplistic assessment, but rather the result of recognising the core problem. The essence of domestic violence is for the perpetrator to be concerned only with their own needs and desires and a willingness to threaten, abuse or assault those they regard, or want to regard, as inferior to them in order to achieve personal gratification and peer status.

The assertions of male superiority, and the right to dominance having been taught for so long, have divided humanity to the extent that it is thought reasonable or even essential that the natures of men and women have to be protected separately. This need for men to go off together to be men, and for women to only associate with each other to feel fulfilled, has gone beyond what is good for a balanced humanity, because it is reinforcing the taught stereotypes that create division and fuel prejudice.

Men do feel threatened about their status in the modern world, but much of this fear comes from what they have been taught to expect of themselves and what they expect to receive from others.

Many of these expectations flow from the reality that our social, political, business and economic practices were designed by men to be operated by men, with women only in a supportive and submissive role. For women to achieve equality this reality needs to change and, as it changes, expectations need to be modified to accept the new reality.

Much has been achieved by men in their management of our world for the last 2000 years, but it has not been perfect or always responsible. Their desire to keep growing the intensity and exploitation of our occupation of our planet, in the face of the reality of its finite size and limited ability to absorb our negative impacts, is profoundly irresponsible. The selfish endeavour that so often ignores the full context of their activities is the source of many of the serious environmental and financial problems we now face.

To again accord to men the supposedly lost status that they crave would reinforce the negative aspects of their prejudicial behaviour. Injecting fairness, equality and responsibility into all our systems is far better than going back to a structure that created so many of our problems.

The competitive man-centric world deflects many aspects of humanity that should be constantly considered if we are to respect each other.

Women have many justifications for finding comfort and solace in each other’s company because of their mistreatment and denigration by men. But their need for reinforcement of their confidence and status separate from men would not be so needful if they were treated with fairness and equality by men.

There are facets of their lives that women share naturally with other women and this can be true for men, but the creation of rival camps, reinforced significantly by inequality and prejudice, will perpetuate social division.

Men need to stop pretending to a status that they do not deserve.

Education in the principles of equality and its purpose needs to start at an early age, but to deal with the current epidemic of domestic violence, our politicians and social leaders need, not to just focus on equality, but on sanctions and punishments for those who encourage or facilitate the continuation of domestic violence.

These leaders should not look for guidance to the organisations that are the sources of the excuses and justifications for inequality and prejudice, but rather understand that equality and protection from prejudice are human rights deserving of direct application and perpetuation for their own sake, and, that if they are to do their jobs properly and responsibly, they should keep these principles in mind at all times.

Referring the problems to endless committee meetings and enquiries needs to stop. Direct action needs to be made to change the law so that the isolation between state and federal courts is not allowed to prevent all evidence of domestic violence and associated court orders from being fully assessed in both jurisdictions before final orders are made. Police and other officials need to be held to account for failing to properly act in domestic violence cases and for failing to ensure continuing protection. Refuges for abused women and their children need to be properly funded and available Australia-wide along with the full range of support services required.

In the current international political climate, calls for fairness and equality are cries in the wilderness, but the reality, that we have let competition and corruption go so far that politicians and billionaires with the moral compass of fourteen-year-old delinquents are ruling a country and negatively impacting the world, should strongly motivate fair-minded and responsible people to do whatever they can to protect humanity. The distortions being reinforced in Trump’s America propose that an ideal man rejects equality for women, dismisses the facts about man’s contribution to global warming, ignores centuries of medical science and reaches the pinnacle of masculinity by labouring in an unregulated coal mine.

We ignore the consequences and implications of such deplorable conduct and fantasies-come-to-life at our peril.

There are oft-repeated cries that it would be fairer for men’s peace of mind if we wound back the clocks to a time where men’s position in society was more certain, as if this could occur without carrying with it the attendant factors of inequality, prejudice, exploitation and domestic imbalance needed to support a real man’s image of himself.

If we are to benefit from looking back, surely it is better to look back to the many thousands of years before the common era when recognition of the female was accorded as much significance as the male. Patriarchy has sought to blind us to the reality that we rely on the females of our species just as much as the males. To denigrate and demean women is to deliberately distort reality.

Whenever we perceive an example of abuse of women or prejudice against them, we need to put unrelenting pressure on our politicians and community leaders to the extent that they can no longer avoid and deflect evidence of this enormous problem. We must do our best to stop them hiding from the truth.

Humanity does not exist without women.

Thinking before Believing.

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